An Ashkenazic-Sephardic Marriage against the Father’s Will

Source Description

On January 24, 1735, the SephardicHamburg merchant
Abraham de Lemos sent the petition
presented here to the Prussian King
Frederick William I.
In this document Abraham de Lemos petitions the
King for the abrogation of the marriage between his
son, Benjamin de
Lemos, a student of medicine at the University of Halle in
Prussia, and
the sister of his Jewish landlord. After a four year stay in Halle, the son, without
the permission of his father, married an Ashkenazic woman. The father’s arguments against
the marriage form the substance of the petition. The hand-written letter,
particularly in the introduction and conclusion, comply with the contemporary
petition formula. The king had the petition sent to the University of Halle in order
to have its opinion; however, this has not been preserved. Yet according to
later sources from the family’s history, it is evident that the
king did not dissolve the marriage of Benjamin de Lemos. The
three page petition resides in the Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage FoundationGeheimes Staatsarchiv,
Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin.

Angry protest

It is apparent from the first reading of the petition that its author has turned
to the king in a state of great agitation. In the
narrative part of the petition, he blames the “cunning wench” for the seduction
of his son and the son for having run through the paternal study money with this
person. Where he obtained this information and how he knew about the marriage
that took place without his consent, he does not reveal. Only with difficulty
does he overcome his anger about the marriage of his son in order to present his
multifaceted argument as to why the king should annul it. He
builds his case with the information that his son is still in his minority
according to Hamburg law, and thus insists that he is still under paternal
authority, and in no position to support himself, much less a family. He caps
the recital with an astonishing argument, namely “marriage between Portuguese
Jews and High German Jews are as extraordinary and objectionable as those
between Christians and Jews.” This comparison relied on false premises because
in that period Christians and Jews could not marry. It serves to dramatize the
case but nevertheless also represents an important key to understanding the text
and references to a larger context.

“Portuguese” and “High German” Jews in Hamburg

Abraham de Lemos, or by his full name, Abraham Benveniste de Lemos, identified himself in
the introduction to his petition as a “Portuguese Jew and broker, resident of
Hamburg.” In
contemporary usage, “Portuguese” signified a descendant of Jews who were
expelled from the Iberian
Peninsula at the end of the 15th century. The more general term for these Jewish
emigrants and their descendants, who at first settled mainly around the
Mediterranean, is “Sephardim”, corresponding to the Hebrew term for Spain, “Sefarad.” The German Jews, on the other hand, were
identified according to the Hebrew designation for Germany (“Ashkenaz”) as Ashkenazim or Ashkenazic Jews. In the petition they appear as
“High German” Jews.

From the end of the 16th
century, Hamburg recorded the arrival of a significant influx of Sephardic Jews, who frequently
came from Amsterdam. Many reached the Hansa city as Catholics
– due to forced conversion – but once there soon converted back to Judaism. They
formed the first Jewish congregation in
Hamburg,
which, during its heyday around 1650 numbered 500. It
survived –quite diminished in number – into the 20th century as a separate congregation. The
Sephardic merchants of
Hamburg were
wealthy long-distance traders, welcomed for economic reasons by the City Council; the
influential Lutheran clergy and citizenry opposed them. The Sephardim, among them many
scholars and physicians, were self-confident and cosmopolitan and felt
themselves to be culturally superior to the German Jews. Ashkenazic Jews arrived only at the beginning of
the 17th century and served as
employees of the Sephardim;
however, they founded their own, rapidly growing congregation. Soon they
constituted the majority of Hamburg’s Jews, while many Sephardic Jews left the Hansa city at the end
of the 17th century because
orthodox Lutherans with the help of the city assembly imposed
restrictions on both Jewish communities.

Good grounds against the marriage?

The Sephardim in Hamburg rejected
marriage relations with Ashkenazic Jews. They had gone so far as to establish a multinational
association to promote marriage exclusively between the “Portuguese” of various
countries. Abraham de Lemos descended from such
a purely Sephardic family.
His maternal great grandfather, the Talmud scholar
Abraham da Fonseca, had come from Amsterdam to Hamburg where he died
in 1651. His son, Dr. Josua da
Fonseca, was physician to the Sephardic congregation of Hamburg
and died in 1701. Abraham de Lemos himself married the daughter of this
physician. As a broker and tobacco handler he was a
highly regarded merchant. His gravestone speaks to his
significance and can be found in the Sephardic section of the Königstrasse cemetery in Hamburg-Altona.

Abraham de Lemos saw the life plan he had worked
out for his son as endangered by his marriage to a German Jew. Presumably, he
had hoped that his son would one day, like his own father-in-law, become the
physician to the Hamburg Sephardic
congregation. Angered, he came up with the idea of appealing to
the University of
Halle’s
sovereign lord to abrogate the marriage of his son. The
idea was all the more surprising because, according to religious law, Jewish
marriages could be dissolved only when the husband granted his wife a letter of
divorce. The petition to the sovereign to dissolve a Jewish
marriage was an affront to Jewish law. Moreover, repudiation of a Sephardic-Ashkenazic marriage was also
not justifiable according to religious law. Abraham de
Lemos had extravagantly brushed aside both objections. Contrary
to his representation, isolated cases of marriage between Portuguese and German
Jews had been performed in Hamburg. From the end of the 17th century such marriages steadily
increased.

Abraham de Lemos made an effort to present the
matter in terms the king was most likely to understand.
Thus, he speaks of the “Jewish Easter,” when he means Passover, and adduces as an argument against the
marriage the fact that his son could neither support himself or a family. The
latter had no bearing on Jewish couples at this time since young marrieds
typically “boarded” with parents, until they were economically
self-sufficient.

The Career of Benjamin de
Lemos

We learn little from the petition concerning the son, Benjamin de Lemos. His
father had sent him to the “world-famous” University of Halle to study
medicine. Although founded in 1694, the university had already
acquired an outstanding reputation as a modern educational institution and a
sanctuary of the Enlightenment. It was one of the first German universities to accept
Jews and had already granted a doctorate to a Jewish medical student in 1724. Benjamin found room and board with another Jewish medical
student, Samuel Simon
Charleville. Charleville was at least ten years older than Benjamin de Lemos and,
following the death of his father, lived with a sister and brother in a common
household.

The father’s assumption of his lazy son’s sinister seduction by Chana Charleville can be put into serious doubt on
the basis of other sources. To begin with, Jewish marriages in this period
almost always proceeded through an intermediary and not through the initiative
of the potential wife. In this case the brother was responsible for the marriage
of his sister, who, allegedly over thirty years old, had exceeded the average
age for marriage. Notwithstanding the difference in ages, the brother saw
Benjamin de
Lemos, a future physician, and one whom they had come to know well,
as an eligible candidate for marriage. All the more so because he was soon to
complete his doctoral studies. According to university documents, the
dean of the medical faculty on February 4, 1735 had requested that the state
ministry allow the promotion of Benjamin de Lemos, whereupon he received his doctorate in
Halle on
May 24. The doctoral candidate was in no
doubt that his parents in Hamburg would not agree to his marriage. That he did not even
inform them of the upcoming marriage was an affront because normally Jewish
marriages were agreed to beforehand by both sets of parents. His decision
therefore meant a break with his family and with the Portuguese congregation of
Hamburg. Returning to Hamburg as a physician
was out of the question.

Benjamin de Lemos and
Chana Charleville were married for 27
years, until Chana’s death; they had several
children. Dr. Benjamin de
Lemos began practicing medicine in the Jewish congregation of Dessau, in the
Duchy of
Anhalt, where he presumably had as a patient the boy Moses Mendelssohn. In 1744, he became the physician to the Berlin Jewish congregation, a
prestigious position which he held until his death in 1789. After the death of Chana, the
successful physician married again, this time Chana’s niece, the daughter of his brother-in-law Dr. Samuel Simon
Charleville, who had in the meantime become the community
physician in Glogau.

The profession of medicine, a family tradition

The petition not only tells of one of the earliest marriages between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in Germany, but, if the
prehistory of this marriage is considered along with the intentions of Benjamin de Lemos and his
brother-in-law, it also reveals the beginning of a medical dynasty. Medicine in
general and also among the Jews was taught for centuries as a manual craft. One
of the first academically trained physicians in Germany was the
grandfather of Benjamin de
Lemos, Dr. Josua da Fonseca,
doctor to the Hamburg
congregation. He took his doctorate in 1648 at Leyden University, at that time the leading university in
Europe.
Leyden, like the
University of Padua,
matriculated Jews before any of the German universities. By 1719, three further members of the de Fonseca family of Hamburg had enrolled at
Leyden. It was his
wife’s family tradition that Abraham de Lemos
wanted to tie into when he sent his son to study in Halle.

Jewish physicians possessed a high social standing in their congregations, for
they were expected to have good knowledge of the Talmud as well as command of the natural
sciences. They belonged among the best educated Jews of their times and often
were exponents of the Haskala, the Jewish
Enlightenment that advocated uniting Talmudic and secular knowledge.

Benjamin de Lemos,
grandson of a Hamburg physician and himself a doctor, married twice, first
the sister and then the daughter of a physician. His children also carried on
the medical tradition; two of his daughters married physicians and two of his
sons studied medicine. The dynasty thus formed lasted over 150 years. He married
his 15 years old daughter Henriette to a Berlin colleague,
Dr. Markus Herz,
who had not only studied medicine in Königsberg but also
philosophy with Kant.
Through the private lectures of Markus Herz, which attracted a circle of enlightened Jewish
scholars, as well as by the famed literary salon of his wife, Henriette and Markus Herz became the most
famous Jewish couple in Berlin.

Break with the old traditions

The petition of 1735 marked the moment at which
Benjamin de Lemos
was one of the first to have broken through the tradition of marrying within the
Hamburg Portuguese
congregation, and from then on began his career as Sephardic physician by serving
in Ashkenazic congregations.
Apparently, he saw the barriers between German and Portuguese Jews in Hamburg as having
become outmoded in an age of the incipient Jewish Enlightenment, an era in which Jews, no
matter their descent, were expected to have more than exclusively Jewish
knowledge. Physicians were among the first to help creating and realizing this
new Jewish educational ideal of the Haskala

Selected English Titles

Chimen Abramsky, The Crisis of Authority within
European Jewry in the Eighteenth Century, in: Siegfried Stein / Raphael
Loewe (eds.), Studies in Jewish Intellectual and Religious History, Alabama
et al. 1979, pp. 13-28.Jacob Katz (ed.), Toward Modernity, The European
Jewish Model, New Brunswick, NJ et. al. 1987.Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early
Modern Europe, New approaches to European history 16, Cambridge et al.
2010.Michael A. Meyer / Michael Brenner
(eds.), German Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol. 1, Tradition and
Enlightenment, 1600-1780, New York 1996.David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry,
1780-1840, New York et al. 1987.

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About the Author

Monika Richarz, Prof. Dr. phil., born 1937, was until her retirement in 2001 director of the Institute for the history of the German Jews (IGdJ). She has conducted broad research in the field of German-Jewish history between the 18th and the 20th century and taught at Hamburg University.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.